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April 5, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
April 5, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And here we are, folks.
It's Tuesday, and that means the Wisconsin primary is underway, and the entire campaign takes on a new meaning, depending on the results tonight.
We've had a lull.
We've had a couple of weeks between the last primaries.
The lull has been filled with the usual blather about polls, opinions, what-ifs, hypotheticals.
Now we're going to get some hard results tonight, and the expectation game is in place.
Greetings, great to have you.
Another three hours of broadcast excellence.
El Rushbo at 800-282-2882.
The email address, Elrushbo at EIBnet.com.
So here's basically in a nutshell.
If Cruz wins tonight, the conventional wisdom is that that resets the entire primary and sets Cruz on a path to win it.
That's what people are saying.
Conventional wisdom.
The other side, if Trump wins Wisconsin, which based on polling data would be considered an upset.
If Trump wins Wisconsin, then the same conventional wisdomers are saying that it's over.
And, you know, in almost both instances, the conventional wisdom wants you to believe that it is over after tonight.
If Cruz wins, it means it's the end of it for Trump.
Because then the burden shifts to him to win big in New York and to win big in Pennsylvania.
Not just win, but to win big.
Ditto in New Jersey.
If it goes all the way to California, latest polling data in California, which is in early June, has Trump and Cruz tied.
And it's fascinating to me that everybody wants this over.
Or at least they're saying things that make it look like they want this to be over.
And I don't think that's really the case.
I think too many people are enjoying the unknown, the unpredictability, and the drama of all of this.
But yet when you get down to the various advocate sides, both sides, we're leaving Kasich out of this for the moment because he's not really in it in the moment.
One for 31.
The guy's won one state, and they're still talking about him.
And it's only in the eventuality of an opener contested convention.
But the Cruz people, really a lot invested in it.
Cruz wins tonight.
The conventional wisdom is it resets the whole thing.
Trump will not have won in five primaries a row, they will be saying.
The conventional wisdom says that here's Trump.
What's his big selling point?
That we're going to win.
With Trump, we're going to win.
There's going to be so much winning, we're going to get tired of winning.
There's going to be so much winning, we're going to ask President Trump to lose now and then just to keep us humble.
But after tonight, if Trump loses Wisconsin, there's no winning.
I mean, there's no momentum.
This will be the fourth or fifth primary in a row that Trump has not won.
So it'll make his primary message, winning, a little empty.
So goes the conventional wisdom, and that's why it would reset everything and mobilize forces for Cruz.
Now, it's interesting on the Cruz side of things.
Don't get mad at me here.
I'm just sharing with you some things that I've learned in recent days.
There's a lot of support for Cruz out there.
I don't think people understand what's really going on throughout the so-called conservative movement.
I am here to tell you that there are some in the conservative movement who will not be unhappy at all if Hillary Clinton becomes president because they can keep their fundraising up.
They keep the donations coming in by warning everybody of the disasters that are going to happen with Hillary Clinton in the White House.
Same thing they accuse me of, essentially.
Except in my case, it isn't true.
I have, for 27 years, I've had various people in media say, you know what?
Limbaugh's talking a good game.
He really loves the Democrats winning because that's when his show really has got things to bounce off of and there's villains and there's enemies.
And not true.
I really do care about the country.
But there are some in the conservative movement.
I mean, I'm going to move the so-called allegation around a little bit.
There are some.
I wouldn't have believed this, by the way, had I not been given some controvertible evidence of it.
But there are some people not advocating for Hillary to win.
They're just not going to be upset if she does.
They are primarily anti-Trumpsters.
This group of conservatives despises Trump.
They worry horribly about Trump for the very same reason.
If Trump wins, and everybody's going to agree that he's not a movement conservative guy, then it's going to impact negatively conservative movement fundraising, donations, and power structures and so forth, because they're not going to be able to claim that they're helping Trump.
They're not going to be able to claim that they're tight with Trump.
So never, never discount the role of money.
You know, that Michael Gerson piece in the Washington Post that I really haven't gone into great detail on on purpose, but he wrote this piece, blaming me for Trump, blaming me for everything.
It was a pretty big hit piece, but those happen routinely now, so he's commented.
But the thing in it that really upset him more than anything was that my allegations about certain members of the establishment wanting to preserve their financial circumstance, their lives.
In other words, that they are being oriented, motivated by money.
Oh, did that offend them?
Because you see, they want to be seen as above all of those mundane concerns like how do you pay the bills.
There's so much more important than that.
They're so much bigger.
They don't have such concerns.
Such concerns would never ever influence their intellectualism.
And there I went and said it.
But you can't deny it.
It's true for everybody.
I mean, even in one of the large constituency groups of Trump, what's motivating a lot of support is stagnant wages for 15 years among a significant portion of Americans.
It matters.
Everybody knows it matters.
Follow the money.
You'll always, most of the time anyway, be able to answer a lot of questions to which the answers don't make sense until you apply the money aspect to it.
So fundraising and donations, people live and die on that.
They need certain circumstances for that to max out.
And they want to two things.
They need to either be able to position themselves as powerful enough to stop the enemy, like Hillary, or they have to be able to portray themselves as up close, personal, and tight enough with whoever is in power to have great influence over that person.
If one of those two circumstances doesn't eventuate, then they panic.
And Trump is what equals one of those two circumstances not eventuating.
I mean, people I'm talking about, and there are a lot of them, they've been totally disposed against Trump since the beginning for a whole host of reasons, but they don't tell you this reason that I am explaining to you.
And what they do, their cover is that they are for Cruz.
This is my real point with this.
They make a point of making it look like their opposition to Trump is rooted in support for Cruz, but it really isn't.
Not that they oppose Cruz, but the thing that motivates them and informs them, that ambulates them, if you will, is really opposition to Trump, which includes not being all that upset if Hillary wins.
Then you have, by the same token, you've got some people in the conservative movement who are dead set against Trump and for Cruz strictly for principle and honor and patriotism and so forth.
So the interests here are many and they are varied and they are deep and many of them are personal.
So if Cruz wins, conventional wisdom, that's it for Trump.
That's four or five losses in a row.
That destroys the brand of winning.
It obviously brings to a screeching halt any momentum, and it will then begin presenting coverage.
Why?
What has gone wrong?
What did go wrong?
What is wrong with Trump?
That begins a whole series of negative coverage, such as the polling data on his unfavorables, primarily with women.
If Trump pulls an upset and wins, then it becomes a matter of 1237, looks like he can make it, and in that sense, it will be over.
So a lot of people, after all of these primaries, and we've had days like this where people said, this is it.
This is what happens tonight.
This is going to determine the outcome.
Those are media people interested in ratings.
But it's true again tonight.
They're saying what happens tonight, Wisconsin will probably tell us how this is all going to end.
But it will not tell us if it takes us to a contested brokered, whatever convention.
It will not tell us what's going to happen there, which continues the possibility for Casey.
It continues the possibility for Paul Ryan, who's saying so often that he doesn't want it that you begin to be suspicious.
And then Marco Rubio is out there desperately holding on to his delegates.
Obviously, wants to have some leverage in what happens.
So that basically is the way the table gets set.
That's how all this happens today.
I myself am not going to know until about 11 o'clock tonight or midnight what happened because I got to go to New York.
I have to zip up to New York after the program and have an annual event tonight.
And I'll be able to sneak a peek now and then, but not much.
So I won't know.
And I will not get home probably until 2 a.m. tomorrow.
Oh, yeah, I'm zipping back.
You don't think I'm staying up there, let the tax authorities figure out I'm doing work up there?
No way.
That'd trigger another three-year audit.
No, so I will zip right back.
I'll get back about 2 in the morning, and I will be able to figure out what all happened on the flight home, on the plane ride home.
So none of what I do here will be interrupted.
I just want you to know if you're thinking, gee, what does Rush think of this?
I won't know.
Unless something so outrageous happens that the event tonight's interrupted for people to learn.
But the event tonight is not political in any way, shape, manner, or form.
So, you know, the watch will be vibrating, and I'll have the phone with me, but I'll be able to check now and then.
But, I mean, I'm not going to be able to get into in-depth stuff.
I'm not going to be able to listen to speeches, victory, defeat, speeches, what have you, whatever happens, until 11 o'clock when it's all over.
I mean, I assume it's going to be known by 11 Eastern Time.
Now, if it's really tight, what's he talking about?
I just saw Obama's doing a thing with the press.
Is he talking about calling for business tax reform?
Is he talking here about reducing the 35% corporate tax rate?
Yeah, nobody knows.
We'll figure out what he's talking about.
And if it's worth it, we're rolling it now, rolling on it.
If it's worth it, we'll have the audio soundbites.
Now, usually, ladies and gentlemen, the pattern for Donald Trump has been during the primary season that when he has lost a primary, he immediately changes the narrative the next day, usually by announcing an endorsement.
So you got Christie endorsing, which changed the narrative of a Trump loss.
Sometimes the endorsement happened the night of a loss, usually next morning.
Same thing happened with Dr. Carson.
After another Trump loss, Carson comes out and endorses Trump, and that changes the narrative.
It's smart.
Trump has no new endorsements to announce.
So what he has done today has revealed his plan, explaining how he is going to have Mayco pay for his proposed wall.
And the way he's going to do this is a Bob Woodward story in the Washington Post.
Trump says he's going to cut off the so-called remittances, i.e., the wired money transfers that Mexicans send back home every year, every month, whatever.
The Mexican illegals working here send a lot of money that they earn back home.
It's one of the reasons why the Mexican government is so much in favor.
There's a bunch of reasons why the Mexican government's in favor of illegal immigration to the U.S. One of those reasons is that much of the money earned by illegals gets sent home to family members back home.
For example, in 2015, you know how much money we're talking about here?
$25 billion.
Nearly $25 billion was sent home by Mexicans living abroad in 2015.
That's not just the U.S., but the lion's share of it is.
And mostly it happens in the form of wire transfers rather than people writing checks.
And this data comes from the Central Bank of Mexico, their version of the Federal Reserve.
Now, Trump isn't planning on using that money for the wall, per se.
That would be stealing.
Instead, Trump says that he will withhold those wire transfers until the Mexican government ponies up the $5 to $10 billion he estimates the wall will cost.
So, the objective here is to have a plan that reinvigorates the campaign, that changes the narrative, that takes it back to a central issue of Trump's campaign that has created so much excitement, and then advances it.
Because the wall is such an old story, the narrative on the wall has become, no, it's never going to build a wall.
Everybody knows that.
It's just Trump talking.
That's just Trump lying to his supporters that he's not going to build a wall, and Mexico is never going to pay for the wall.
That has settled in.
So Trump has to counter that and has done so in the Washington Post.
And again, he's just going to withhold those wire transfers, keep that money from reaching Mexico until the Mexicans agree to pay for the wall.
And it's obviously an attempt to make everybody stop saying that there's not going to be a wall.
Here is the specific plan, how he's going to do it.
The odds of this working.
It could be done.
And I'll tell you what, a lot of Trump supporters are going to applaud it.
They're going to dig it.
They are going to be supportive of this.
We have all kinds of polling data out there today, including from Quinnipiak, which talks about how the American people think about this campaign and what they want in a leader.
And basically, it is 53% of you say you want a leader who will do or say anything to save this country and to establish this country's prominence once again around the world.
More details when we get back.
Don't go away.
Greetings, welcome back.
Great to have you.
El Rushball behind the golden EIB microphone.
A little bit of what President Obama's talking about.
And as usual, it's hypocrisy on parade here.
The president is talking about how most Americans work hard and play by the rules.
And they need to know that big corporations are not gaming the tax system.
He's talking about corporate inversions, which is not hard to understand.
The U.S. has the highest corporate taxes in the world, 35%.
And Obama's out there talking about the unintended consequences of this being real.
And he said, when companies exploit loopholes, it sticks the rest of us with the tab.
They're not exploiting any loopholes.
There's a 35% corporate tax rate.
So corporations are setting up offices in foreign countries.
And they are being taxed on money they earn elsewhere in the world in those countries and keeping the money in those countries, wherever they happen to be.
It could be Ireland, Europe, China, it doesn't matter.
They're not exploiting a loophole.
They are simply following the laws of other countries rather than this one.
They're avoiding a 35% tax rate.
There's no loophole here.
The unintended consequences are the high tax rate.
This is exactly what happens when you have punitive tax rates.
People will do what they can within the law, which means there are no loopholes, to avoid them.
And he's complaining that these are loopholes that only wealthy Americans have access to because they have offshore accounts.
I figured it out.
I feel why Obama is now interrupting on this program and stepping on what we had planned to do today.
We haven't discussed this, but you may have heard it by now, this leak of memos, letters, data, files from a law firm.
It's got a name called the Panama Papers Leak.
And what these Panama papers document is the offshore accounts of a whole slew of world leaders where they have wired sent money from their countries into their own personal stash, Cayman Islands and elsewhere.
And in the case of Vladimir Putin, for example, the amount is like $21 trillion.
$2.1 trillion.
Wait a minute.
$21 billion is what Putin has squandered.
And it mentions a whole lot of other world leaders.
And they have been working in consort these suspicions.
Folks, this is, you know, I hate to be a CI.
I told you this is exactly what socialists and communists do.
They literally steal from the wealth of their own countries.
They punitively tax everybody.
They keep everybody equal.
It's all totally fair and equal, but everybody's miserably poor.
Except the people who run the country, the leaders, they make out like bandits because that's what they are.
And in order to keep the circumstance that profits them in place, they build walls around their country.
They penalize people that would speak out against it.
They put them in political prisons, you name it.
I mean, this is what communism and socialism are known for.
And Obama is worried about this.
Obama's worried this stuff is all these.
And now he's out there trying to blunt the news from the Panama Papers leak and shift the blame as far as the American public is concerned to the corporate tax rate and what are being called corporate inversions.
You know what a corporate inversion is?
It's very, it can be complicated.
One of the simplest ways to explain it, you have, let's say, a major U.S. company, the ABC Widget Company, and they don't like the 35% corporate tax rate.
So what they do, they sell, quote unquote, in quotes, they sell a majority of the company to a subsidiary in Europe where there is a much lower tax rate, which then ends their requirement to pay the U.S. corporate tax rate.
These corporations have asked that the 35% corporate tax rate be reduced.
They have not been satisfied on that.
The U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest, it's in the top five, highest corporate tax rates in the world.
And this is what Obama describes as an unintended consequence.
It's what the left, doesn't matter how many times they try it, they come out, they raise taxes, and they think everybody's just going to sit there and pay it.
They devise a liberal tax plan is a tax plan rooted in punishment.
They raise taxes on the rich, thinking the rich are just going to sit there and pay it.
Corporations don't pay taxes.
They increase prices as much as the market will permit, sometimes in collusion, in order to have the prices they charge increase, which means that whatever taxes they pay end up actually being paid.
The money is generated by consumers.
Everybody knows this.
You don't have to have read Friedrich Hayek to understand this.
But when the rich don't sit there and accept the punishment and pay the rate, then people like Obama pull their hair out and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, loopholes, loopholes, unintended country.
There are any loopholes.
The way they use the word loophole, they want you to think these people are breaking the law.
They want you to think they've found some place in the tax law that they can squeeze in there to evade the left's attempts to scorch them.
They call that breaking the law, i.e.
using loopholes.
There are any loopholes here.
It's simply called incentive.
If you can find a way to avoid a high tax rate, you do it.
They're all within the law.
All these corporations are.
They make you mad.
It may make you think they're not patriotic.
It may upset you because you can't do it yourself, but they're not breaking the law.
And they're not exercising loopholes.
Not as loopholes are defined by people like Obama.
So I am sure what this press conference that he just concluded is all about these Panama papers.
And I'll tell you about that.
The Panama Papers, there's a story here in the International Business Times today.
This is day two or three of this story.
And the headline, this version of the story is about all the people who made this possible.
make possible for worldwide, primarily dictator leaders to steal money from their own people and then transfer it to offshore accounts where there is no taxation and are very little and there's no record of it.
The equivalent of squirreling it away in Swiss banks.
And the latest iteration of this story from the International Business Times headline says it all, Panama Papers, colon, Obama Clinton pushed trade deal amid warnings it would make money laundering and tax evasion worse.
Bingo.
You want to know what the purpose of any of these international trade deals has been?
It has been to enrich profits of people who are the donor class in American politics.
It has nothing to do with party other than the greatest recipients in recent years have been Democrats of corporate money, particularly Wall Street corporate money.
Years before more than 100 media outlets around the world released stories on Sunday exposing a massive network of global tax evasion detailed in the Panama Papers, by the way, which come from a law firm which helped to set all this up.
U.S. President Barack Hussein Oh and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for a Bush administration negotiated free trade agreement that watchdogs warned would only make the situation worse.
After taking orifice in 2009, Obama and Hillary began pushing for the passage of stalled free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea that opponents said would make it more difficult to crack down on Panama's very low income tax rate, banking secrecy laws, and the history of non-cooperation with foreign parts.
I'm sure that's what he went out there today.
He's trying to counter what happened because the Trans-Pacific Partnership that he's authored is all part of the insider's deal to make this kind of thing easy.
You wonder why nobody's allowed to read the Trans-Pacific Partnership Deal?
You wonder why nobody's allowed to tell you what they read when they go down to a secret basement room to read it?
You wonder why nobody's allowed to take notes?
So that's what's going on here.
And so Obama's out here now trying to blame all of this, that his buddies, people like him, worldwide leaders, are getting rich on the backs of their own people.
He's now doing what leftists do, going out and blaming corporate America for exercising loopholes and unintended consequences.
And now he's pushing for tax reform, which includes two things.
I think he wants to reduce the corporate rate, but he kept talking about closing loopholes.
There are no loopholes.
What he's talking, I'm sure what he wants is legislation that would make corporate inversions illegal because he thinks they are now.
Or it's not that.
He doesn't like that people are able to slither and work their way around his efforts to punish them.
So he wants more legislation to trap them and to limit their mobility, their freedom to move their money around and structure themselves in legal ways to avoid it.
I'm not making excuses for him, folks.
I'm just saying this is what happens.
This is not abnormal.
Smart people are not just going to sit there and accept punishment in the form of high tax rates.
They're going to try to avoid it.
It's no different than average ordinary Americans leaving, say, New York to go to Texas to avoid New York taxes.
It's the same thing.
It's no different than that.
Those people are not using loopholes.
And there aren't any unintended consequences there.
It's just the law and common sense.
So you have people leaving New York.
You have people leaving a lot of high-tax states.
California, they're going places where there are either no income taxes or very low state income taxes because the economy's tight.
They want to keep more of their money.
They're the ones that earn it.
In Obama's world, that's not good patriotism.
They're just supposed to sit there and pay these tax rates, and that's what a U.S. corporations are supposed to do.
Obama, and hell, not just Obama, everybody in Washington, they want that money back.
They want the grand total of whatever corporations are keeping offshore.
Now, I don't mean in the accounts, I mean profits they're keeping in foreign countries.
Say Europe or China, Obama wants that money back here.
It would help the GDP.
It would help his statistics.
It might help grow the economy.
So this is all about nudging them, threatening them to start doing things he wants so that he will look better.
This isn't about improving everybody's life or any of that.
This is not about our values and who we are.
It's not about any of that.
And what I'll tell you what it's really about is a Republican presidential campaign because when Obama finished, he cited both Cruz and Trump and their economic and immigration proposals.
And he said Cruz and Trump's proposals are just as draconian when it comes to immigration as anything he's heard.
Trump and Cruz, equally bad.
So he wanted to get a nudge in on the Republican presidential primaries as well.
So that's what this is about.
We take another time out.
We'll resume where we left off before the guy interrupted.
And that's with polling data and other things in Wisconsin.
Plus, your phone calls are going to be part of the mix.
As always, be right back.
Yeah, there's no question here.
Folks, what Obama is trying to do, he's trying to change the narrative, particularly with low-information voters, into thinking that the Panama Papers corruption is about corporations.
And it isn't.
The Panama Papers corruption is about socialist communist dictators.
There's not a capitalist leader in the bunch.
Not a single one.
The Panama Papers expose the corruption of socialists and other dictators, not capitalism.
So here's Obama riding to the rescue, making it look like what you're learning about the Panama Papers is about corporations, primarily U.S. corporations, exploiting tax loopholes and not being willing to pay their fair share.
But the truth is, the narrative is not about American companies.
It's about corrupt public socialist and communist dictators.
The same people, the same people who signed laws to make all these tax shelters legal.
Some president had to sign this stuff.
What do you mean?
I signed a law.
This has got loopholes in it.
Well, somebody better move in and close the loophole.
This is all just insulting to anybody's intelligence has any idea what's going on here.
And it's typical.
I mean, I wouldn't think we go so far as to point out Obama's buddies here are in a little bit of a vice and he's trying to get them out of it.
There's not one capitalist country leader mentioned in these Panama papers, not yet.
And it has nothing to do with American corporations.
This is about world leaders from communist and socialist countries stealing their own people blind and establishing offshore accounts, money laundering, tax evasion, all that.
Now, the Quinnipiac poll, I want to get to this before we finish the hour, and we've got a great roster of calls I'm looking forward to getting to.
And of course, great audio soundbite roster.
Once again, the people, the babes, excuse me, the babes at the View have just discovered what I said maybe eight years ago.
What about the concept of an aging female president?
Remember when at the end of a monologue defending Hillary Clinton, she was under assault for this.
I was defending Hillary Clinton, and I asked the question, do the American people want to observe their president, obviously aging?
Well, that little question is all that Maude Behar and the babes at the View apparently are aware of what I said.
So they think it's outrageous.
It's horrible.
It's just horrible.
And so they had a little discussion about it.
Yes, they did.
And we have that coming up as the prelude to audio soundbites relating to Wisconsin.
Now, the Quinnipiac poll, the highlight of this poll is an answer to a question, what do you want an American leader?
53% of voters say they want a leader willing to say or do anything to keep and make America great.
57% of voters strongly agree or somewhat agree with the statement that America has lost its identity.
57% agree.
Only 36% of Democrats agree with that premise.
79% of all Republicans, 85% of Trump supporters agree.
79% of Republicans, 85% of Trump supporters agree America's lost its identity.
That beliefs and values are under attack in America.
62% of all voters agree with that statement.
Only 40% of Democrats agree that their beliefs and values are under attack.
85% of Republicans, 91% of Trump supporters agree with it.
Next premise advanced, we need a leader willing to say or do anything to solve America's problems.
A leader willing to say or do anything to solve America's problems.
53% of all voters agree with the statement.
Only 39% of Democrats agree.
84% of Trump supporters agree.
68% of all Republicans agree.
There's much more, but those are the early highlights.
By the way, both California and New York have officially raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour, phased in over the next couple of years.
It's not being talked about much, but let me tell you what that is.
That is a huge attraction to illegal immigration.
Plus, it's also a disguised way of raising union wages for the purposes of snatching even more dues from union members that ends up at Democrat Party campaign coffers.
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